Superfluities Redux

All against the conception of human as individual rather than an atom of a mass (the mass the monad for industrial and mass thinking). And more: atomic fragments of a mass now, in the present, having lost not history (for we can't lose that, it's not ours to lose or reject) but historical consciousness, so that all seems new to us and we remain infantile, discovering truths as if for the first time when they've been common in the race for four millennia and more. We flatter ourselves.

There is violence and violence. A violence that comments on itself, and a violence that comments on us. We can pretend to stand apart from that self-regarding violence and appreciate the craft of it. How well-lit and framed. The latter violence that comments on us is more disturbing and leaves us in our silence as collaborators in that violence. (To fully, entirely understand the phenomenon of a film like Miami Vice we have to imagine the flesh of Crockett and Tubbs' victims as our own.) And so: an artist participating in that violence stains his performance. I can't watch Mel Gibson as Hamlet now (though perhaps his performance in Lethal Weapon is better than ever). Unutterably foul. Not as foul, perhaps, as watching Presidents and Prime Ministers urging patience for another week of bloodied racist bombing, with empty promises of cease-fires. But it is a matter of quantity, not quality.

4

Rebeginnings: Siva. Beginnings are kaleidoscopic: instead of endless hopeless attempts to find a correct entry one must just make the leap and begin, trusting to chance to contextualize. At least three Creations in Genesis, I'm reminded; and the Four Gospels of the New Testament, all contradictory in their beginnings. And three Hamlets at least, at least two King Lears.

Our eventual beginning, whatever we might choose, will contextualize itself, the key is to escape interpretation and understanding, the urges to rationalize the myth's mystery, instead accepting possibilities, avoiding the urge to whittle them down to a single origin of sensation that we think will be the correct one. It will be a beginning, if it is ours, make no mistake. But if we keep to the outline we make it won't be ours. It will, really, be the outline's, and no-one's. The writerly act originates in the body, and the body must move, drawn to the source of its invitation to move. If not, if we deny the urge to begin, we engage in a rationalistic Puritanism that denies the myth's power to draw us. What Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked about the reader of myth is as true of the writer of drama, who "will find himself carried toward that music which is to be found in myth and which, in the complete versions, is preserved not only with its harmony and rhythm but also with that hidden significance that I have sought so laboriously to bring to light, at the risk of depriving it of the power and majesty that cause such a violent emotional response when it is experienced in its original state, hidden away in the depths of a forest of images and signs and still fresh from a bewitching enchantment, since in that form at least nobody can claim to understand it."

Like the mythologist, the dramatist enters the dark, through what break in the woods is immaterial, so long as the exploration begins: all roads lead to the not-home, the not-real, the sensation of the myth. In the case of the bewitching forest, the paths marked only slightly at the start: so many have turned back, so the ground trodden only to various degrees. And all paths into a labyrinth of myth and forest illusory. A boy lost in the woods is only lost if he thinks so. Otherwise, he looks and discovers. The path out to be discovered at leisure.

5

Bare life: Homo sacer. Theatre is the art form that validates the self-aware biological being in the midst of others, in community, even alone on stage surrounded by audience: the perceiving life perceived, judged, examined. Thinking about contemporary politics and in particular assessing Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life and the state of exception and Agamben's idea that 9/11 posits the permanent condition of the "state of exception" from imperial, Aristotelian law, allowing bases like Guantanamo to exist without meaningful protest. That an explicitly masculinist power feels free to establish such possessions of beings without rights or wills, is a unique political, biological, sexual state of exception. The concentration camp domesticated and internalized. (Such possessions at the mercy of a power which possesses the will, and the ability, to use violence against the vulnerable individual self if offended or desirous of doing so, deliberately, arbitrarily.) The struggle is against this exception, through the ability of the individual biological self to say "no" to being possessed, for bare life to be allowed to operate outward with others, instead of isolated. The refusal to allow Guantanamo inmates counsel or appeal is isolative. Writ large, power behaving as it does after the rise of the corporate totalitarian state, Guantanamo is an extreme symbol of the political self under this state. (A note for the margins: it also symbolizes the state-sanctioned closure of the possibilities posed by the multiform myth: the end of play.)

As theatre holds that biological presence is the basis of its experience, so Agamben's idea of the Biopolitical Self seems a technique worthy of exploration. (Agamben ascribes the origin of this idea to Foucault's The History of Sexuality.) Modern totalitarian politics apes theatre, centering the body. Agamben: "The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original -- if concealed -- nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. ... Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii." (Emphasis Agamben.)

The significance of the biopolitical body in the theatrical sphere as an object or subject for contemplation and violent activity is clear. It connects Pinter's work to Kane's, and provides a political aspect of theatre minima's explorations of tragedy and sexuality. (To what extent do we allow the language of the state to create our bodies? To create each other? To create our selves? What language do we absorb, do we allow to play or define? If the unconscious is structured like a language, as Lacan posits, how have we allowed the state, or its representatives like corporations [mass media, the telephone and technologies companies that control our access to this seemingly free "Internet" -- the cruel, vicious joke that there is such a thing as "virtual" or "online" life, putting life in the hands of a cabal of technologists -- the language we absorb from a popular culture that is the creation of the powerful], or its microcosms like the family, to manipulate our language and then our bodies as they exist in our eyes?) Each body on stage an instance of the individual in the state of exception. To examine the decisions that are made in the freedom that remains, to a closer connection to the totalitarian state, or to an escape into human possibility. A field that underlies all art that centers the body, or bare life.

Exploration of Agamben's idea through Adorno's aesthetics after the disastrous failure of the project of the Enlightenment: the Enlightenment mind turned against its own failure.

6

Seduction, precision and desire. In his The Theatre of Howard Barker, Charles Lamb draws a parallel between the practices of Stanislavsky and Brecht, underlining the shared perspective of the rationality that informs both:

Brecht's rationalism, however, performs the same controlling function as Bond's or Edgar's Marxism -- it is, theoretically, the organizing principle of his artistic method. When Brecht succeeds in adhering to his ideological purpose, his "representational" experiments are rigged so that open critical response from his audience is circumscribed. All Brecht's fuss with anti-realist, anti-illusionist devices suggests nothing so much as the posturings of a conjuror, persistently demonstrating empty hands, showing the inside of the top hat, revealing both sides of the handkerchief. The implication is that we see everything, no concealment, no tricks -- we are in touch with "reality" throughout -- all of which facilitates the foisting of an illusion.

Coupled with Stanislavsky's statement to his colleagues in the Moscow Art Theatre upon its foundation -- "We are trying to create the first rational, moral, public theatre and it is to this lofty aim we dedicate our lives" -- the 19th-century rationalist basis for both Brecht's and Stanislavsky's theatre becomes clear. So much for innovation: it's a theatre that belongs in the world of Newtonian physics, not quantum mechanics. What neither artist acknowledges is that theatre is an art of seduction, although that seductive impulse operates in all theater. This acknowledgement of the irrationality of seduction would undermine their own rationalist projects. It seems that, in the recent Mother Courage production in Central Park, the seductive power of Meryl Streep's performance far outstrips the seductive power of the production itself; hence the great critical acclaim for her performance, the great critical disapproval of the production. The critics are in love with Meryl, who returns their attention.

Another approach is to welcome and embrace the seductive operation of live performance: to make it explicit, rather than hide it under the rationalist consciousness. Seduction denies rationalism in the effort to transcend the suffering that the history of rationalism has foisted upon the race: audience and performer join beyond the field of questions, beyond the field of meaning. The rational individual cannot stand seduction: it is a giving-up of control, of the illusory integrated self, which is then set free into a field of experiential possibility. Instead of judging behavior and performance, as Brecht insists is necessary, auditor and artist join in accepting and experiencing behavior, widening consciousness instead of limiting it to the same bloodless perspective that led to twentieth-century tragedies of rationalist behavior.

Unfortunately for the 20th-century anthropocentric rationalist, it also means an irrational acknowledgement of death and violence, of the erotic possibilities of theatrical and aesthetic presentation. (This it shares with the late Elizabethan, the Jacobean theatre.) We should despise a theater we can understand. Theater and drama not a crossword puzzle to be filled in by the audience from clues left by the playwright, the director, the performers. Until we tear down the walls that both Stanislavskian and Brechtian practices validate, the walls that continue to separate us from each other will continue to exist. Given its risk, then, we take not sledgehammers to that wall, but the most precise instruments of invasion: words that seduce. Beckett knew this; Pinter and Barker and Foreman know it. In our careen towards disaster, only the most extraordinary measures will eradicate our perverse yearning for self-torture.

7

"Don't want to, but must": Murderers among us. In many ways Fritz Lang's 1931 M is a bitter comedy of the period, even physically: the physiognomies of the characters leap from Grosz's sketchbooks, erasing the differences between virtue and vice, good and evil. Today, particularly, the hysterical search for the killer, a killer who lives in all of us (we search outside ourselves to eradicate evil when we need only turn within), resounds: the hypocrisy of the collective criminal bourgeois organized against an individual criminal bourgeois. A corpulent, smug, legitimate establishment working with a thin, reptilic, illegitimate establishment: former enemies allies, and uneasy. And our tools turned against us. Airplanes, the science of flight and architecture, religion turned against us, and a lashing out: knives, the trusting innocence of a child, our own bodies and wills turned against us, and a lashing out. Our rational efforts to locate and eradicate the irrational source comic: a bumbling search for the terrorist, a bumbling search for the child sex-murderer. Accompanied by bombast and a media-induced panic that roots fear and violent retribution in the soul.

And the punch-line: there is always another, living next door to us, or in ourselves, waiting for its opportunity to leap into the world. This we can't stomach: the searing truth we don't care to face. And so it happens, time and time again, to the end of the world.

According to the tantras, we are in the period of the kali-yuga, an age in which sacred teachings have been lost, in which the world and its inhabitants are sunk in a swamp of greed and violence. It was said to have begun when Krishna left the earth in 3102 BCE. Bad news for ameliorists and optimists: the period will last for 360,000 years.

8

The Writer's Body as Instrument of Investigation. The dramatist is invisible after the theatrical text is created and passed along to the performer for expression, which begs the question: If the dramatist is not expressing during the performative instant, if her work is perceived to have been finished months or years before, what is she doing there? Why there at all, especially in the transgressive performance styles of Antonin Artaud and Reza Abdoh? As profoundly physical as the act of physical performance is, the psychic investigation of the writer requires that she use her body as an open conduit for the perception, investigation, and description of the unconscious Schopenhauerian Will that runs through it. The performer expresses; the dramatist reads impressions of Representations on her body and describes (and inscribes into a hopelessly inadequate language) the linguistic scrapes and leavings of that Will. The dramatist answers the question that is directed to her ("Why your text at all?") with this response: "I leave my markings with what the long culture and history of writing has given to me, adding my own scratchmarks to go a little further along the road to destruction and light: the Will offers both." To be fully open and aware of the Will's operation the writer's body needs to be as trained and supple, as well-equipped for physical observation as the performer's is well-equipped for physical expression, this training a cleansing of the skin's lenses. The avenues towards transcendence are often those which are most obscured by sloppiness, waste, laziness, carelessness, trivia, and garbage. The noisier the representation, the more precise eye; the more inadequate the language to the experience, the more carefully considered word. Every word, from noun and verb to preposition and article, carries with it its own theoretical antonym. The dramatist works against this inherent irony and self-contradiction of language. She keeps trying to express lucidly, without irony. To do so she needs the lucid, limpid eye to still her inscribing, shaking, imperfect hand. Which nonetheless, as physiological expression of the Will, is always working against itself. The dramatist writes herself out of her expression and disappears into the performer's body and voice. Nonetheless, a bodied presence herself in those words, though invisible, requiring a continuing effort at physical perfection of the perceiving instrument, the writer's body (always aging, always decaying, always at the mercy of the amoral microbe that offers dis-ease).

9

Think/Am Thought. The Cartesian principle collapses upon itself in an age of identity acquired from mass-distributed digital culture. The Collapsible Giraffe troupe's recent performance at Prelude '06 demonstrates one such collapse. Performers drop the pretense of speaking a self-generated text, disturbing the illusion of autonomy, by donning earphones before they speak; the question, then, is whether they're repeating to us only what they're hearing, what is being filtered through them by a recording, or by a text generated just prior by another performer, or through the repetition of a popular song's lyrics. The performance's video component served, similarly, as a basis for physical imitation, becoming a form of live video ("video" containing its implicit subject/object dichotomy; I see, therefore I am; I am seen, therefore I am), blurring the exhibitionist/voyeur pas de deux into a single body.

They are spoken, rather than speak; I am written, rather than write. As the simulacra of mass-produced, mass-distributed digital images become ever more our stage of life, all numbers, we give up the analog. (A footnote of some curious relevance here. At recent Spiegeltent performances by the Absinthe troupe and Camille O'Sullivan, performers were disturbed during the sound check by the quality of the amplified reproduction, which tended to wash noise from the sound: those imperfections that rendered the amplified voice still human. The culprit was the sound board: it was digital. Replaced by an old analog board, the performers were happier: they were human again. Similarly, I am fond of my Wurlitzer electronic piano, model 200A, which has a physical, mechanical action, rather than a means by which to digitally synthesize this action. And if anybody knows where I might be able to get this rebuilt, please let me know; it needs it.) Which is not to posit that the analog existence ever was, or can be, particularly positive or superior in and of itself. We are also spoken by our families, our ideologies, our relationships, our culture. It becomes such an ingrained habit that we are unaware of the extent to which this cultural syntax, these vocabularies and appearances, deprive us of the possibilities of self-definition and the freedoms bodied perception can provide.

The truly revolutionary act is to reappropriate language and body, to wrench it (through destructive parody or through a disciplined effort of stripping existence [performance or theatre, this dichotomy too is illusory] of its superfluities) from the institutions, customs, habits, corporations, simulacra -- the impositions of definition by institutionalized thinking -- which have appropriated them from us (with our permission; it's much easier to give them up for a return of amusement or illusory comfort). I am quitting smoking and it is very hard to give up that habit until I can come to terms with the addictive qualities of this habit (for it's addictive, a modifier of my body, not an addiction, an element of my body, per se): to examine and then deny the destructive qualities of unconscious habit. I need to keep in mind that it's not necessarily to avoid cancers that I need to quit, for cancers and heart disease can come even without cigarettes; it is instead to cleanse the instrument of perception. It is not that I smoke; it is that I am smoked. Quitting becomes an act of anarchy in the service of perception.

10

Like a breath. About ten years ago, Grove Press published a series of beautifully produced facsimiles of Samuel Beckett's theatrical notebooks: the prompt copies he prepared as he readied himself to direct his own plays. Over the last thirty years or so of his life, Beckett had opportunity to direct most of his own work; before making the mistake of calling these the "definitive" productions of these plays, we would remember that Beckett himself never characterized them so. They were, instead, the versions of the plays as the author himself might envision them at the time they were produced, always with the reminder that even an author's attitude to his or her own work changes over time, and that Beckett revised his own plays and productions as he revisited the texts. Cavils that Beckett considered these productions final, set in stone, dictatorially correct, are conclusions borne of poorly-informed rumor about the man's own processes (rumor adequately scotched with only a little research into the matter) and the behavior of the Beckett estate (hardly attributable to the man himself, dead these past 17 years).

The notebooks are an interesting resource for determining a directorial process to a lyrical stage minimalism. Beckett's preparation included his own memorization and annotation of the text before he entered the rehearsal hall: study and consideration not only of the language, but of light, color, the texture of costumes. (Beckett had a keen eye and ear, trained over many years of studying art history and music; his attitude towards color, shadow, texture, and body placement was as considered as Caravaggio's or Friedrich's. And he worked closely with designers and technicians of similar temperament and background, constantly seeking their suggestions and input as to the achievement of a particular effect.) The notebooks are filled with sketches and arrows indicating movement, often as precise as an architect's blueprint.

Even for these short plays, the rehearsal process was a period of long experiment, but not an experimentation of blocking or design; Beckett was quite clear about the expectations he had for the concrete, inorganic aspects of theatrical production. So these details of design and blocking were already determined by the time rehearsals began. Instead, Beckett worked with actors as he would likely work with musicians (Beckett was an accomplished amateur pianist). His expectation always, as it commonly is in the arena of musical performance, was that his performers would be off-book when rehearsals began, so that no time would be wasted in rote memorization. This Beckett considered work that could, and should, be completed by the first day of rehearsal. Instead, the weeks of rehearsal were dedicated to physicalizing the language, Beckett working intimately with the performers, shaping the physicality of the work in very close collaboration with well-trained performers.

Beckett took the trouble to hand-write the full text in these notebooks, notating with precision, to the syllable, where pauses and silences and changes of tone should occur. If Beckett was a director who made unusual demands of precision and physical movement from his actors (not unlike Grotowski and Foreman), he demanded the same precision and care from his own thinking about a staged text; his crabbed handwriting, in these autograph pages, reveals an unbending service to the text, even as he, as director, treated it as a mere start for a fully staged realization, to be completed by the performer, who would, after all, end up vocalizing these pauses, silences, and tones, every pause as performed as a word.

If one has studied music one is familiar with notation and annotation, and the peculiarities of twentieth-century music are, in some cases, far more open to performative creativity and expression than those of earlier music. It's interesting, too, that in discussing Beckett's work, actors and actresses tend to access musical, not psychological, terms. Veteran Beckett performer David Warrilow has gone so far as to say, "I barely deal with psychological reality. ... What works is finding what musicians have called the 'right tone.' By 'right' I mean what works for me. I then have to trust that it'll work for somebody else -- that if I get it right, if I sing it 'on key,' 'in tune,' it's going to vibrate properly for somebody else. ... When the note is not quite 'on,' it makes me physically uncomfortable, it makes me nervous, it doesn't sit right, I start to get negative feedback from my system."

To gauge the kind of creativity that Beckett sought in his actors and actresses, one can turn to the musical scores of Beckett's contemporaries and near-contemporaries. I'm thinking particularly here of Schönberg and Webern, whose extraordinarily precise scores nonetheless reveal entrances for a performer's creativity.

In the very precise but passionate music of both composers, one finds small notations. Above a chord or a short passage, Webern might write, "in parenthesis," or "left hand like a mysterious drum," or "more!" How does one play such things? The final chord of Schðnberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke should be played, the composer tells us, "like a breath." How does a pianist strike this chord with this explicit exhalation? (I studied this particular work when I took piano lessons a few years ago, and believe me, I lacked the training and discipline for it; it's not easy.) But this is where the performer brings his or her training, talent, sympathy for the score, to the performance, and no two performances are identical: the breath is individual. So, too, for a lyrical theatre that grants the performer new autonomy.

11

Elsewhere. I'm less and less interested in plays and writings about theatre, more and more in other disciplines. In thinking of the writer's body as an instrumental eye, realistic and naturalistic dramatic texts don't serve. The language lacks muscle and sinew, flesh and sensation. There is a disconnect between language and writer's body; the pen could have written these without a hand's guidance.

Language and body merged. The words, and the gesture, opening a catastrophic eye. In her preface to Bataille's Inner Experience, translator Leslie Anne Boldt clarifies Bataille's sometimes too gnomic expression: "In fusion [of one and other], the subject is absent, the object is dissolved in continuity, yet this continuity is radically outside of any continuity which a discontinuous being might envisage. It is NIGHT, but a night which 'is' not -- a night which can only be apprehended by a vision which has been decentered, rendered 'ex-orbitant' by the emptying of its contents into the abyss of non-knowledge. The eye is a privileged image in Bataille's texts. In the appropriation of an image during the course of normal vision [or 'normal,' traditional drama -- GH], the blind spot where the rays of light intersect is of little consequence. It is both a place of non-being (on its own, it can generate no image) and the site where the power of vision is concentrated (where the elements of image are condensed). It is of great consequence, however, at the moment of fusion: when the stores of knowledge are released, the blind spot of the eye is dilated. In it, knowledge is absorbed into the NIGHT of non-knowledge -- the intersection of rays opens violently in a movement of catastrophe."

Theatrically and performatively speaking, the eye of the body is reflective of the spectator; looking deeply into it, as in a yogic contemplation and meditation, one sees that darkness of the dilated blind spot: the notion of attraction and the gravity of night, a black hole of attempted perception that absorbs and swallows all around it. All language a seduction into it. So the performative body tricks and seduces, an extraordinarily transgressive, revolutionary invitation, an invitation into the "abyss of the unknown," an unknown with a very individual quality because shaped, in vision, by the principium individuationis (the same principle which is undermined and destroyed by Dionysian union) of the individual's body (hence its transgression: to let go, to release, the known, in expectation of an experience that suggests the ability to glimpse the erotic wounds of tragedy; only suggestion because ultimately metaphoric, though the urge to escape from this metaphor is the truly theatrical experience). One talks of the pleasure of theatre. But pleasure and pain are a dichotomy arising from the subject/object relationship. In the quotidian they are antipodal. In ecstatic fusion they are one. Though theatre, and perhaps all art, can do nothing more than suggest, to exemplify, the fusion, because publicly performative, nonetheless this is why theatre is not mere fun, entertainment: it is religious, psychic, spiritual, what have you. And why precise discipline and cleansing of the writer's passive eye, the performer's active eye (all body, all skin, eye), is the foundation of its exercise.

This clearly has practical effects and consequences in terms of health, in terms of linguistic and gestural discipline (how close many theatrical warm-up exercises come, for example, to the practice of asana, but the majority of the time only its physical, not its perceptual, practice in intent). Beckett's directorial process a distillation of Grotowski's in many ways, a distillation that focuses, laserlike and with enormous precision and subtlety, on the body's performance of linguistic expression. So a basis not only for a dramatic theme and philosophy, but also a preface to a book of its directorial, compositional, dramaturgic, and design practice.

12

Once removed. The re-presented human body, in such intense manipulated fakery as theatre and photography, suggests a crucible for the experience of desire and torture, a straining of the possible against the impossible, once removed: representation and metaphor themselves the space of art, manipulation and language themselves the vehicles of removal. Perhaps these were the elephants in the room that Artaud and Grotowski tried so vociferously and intensely to deny, in so far as their work was fated to fail, even as invested and inspired with religion and mysticism as their work was it lacked the one aspect of religion and mysticism that all sects share: the spoken prayer. (Even if Artaud prayed in his essays and poetry, he so loathed prayer on the stage, preferring the scream instead.) At the very least this prayer was subordinated to an illusory performative freedom. To make language count we make a leap of faith, participate in a suspension of disbelief and pretend that there is a "magic" to it: an intonation and precise vocabulary that, spoken in the correct order and at the right speed, will lead us to a state of suspension when we can feel the body's release into a realm where detachment and immanence is possible. And this is common illusion that we buy tickets for; it is only possible in the twin vehicles of sacrifice and orgasm that Bataille describes; but art can merely suggest. True transfiguration is beyond visibility, so beyond the theatre, or photography, or art. Stage darkness is an absence of light; even in black the boards creak as the performers sneak on and off stage. Real darkness is a pure absence, an absence even of black.

In a very crude fashion art is an assembly manual which tells you how to put the experience together, but no assembly manual is substitution for the thing assembled. Perhaps you are all thumbs or in cutting corners you decide to not tighten the screws (saves time, and stands well enough without it), to replace a missing part with some sloppily applied glue (it will look the same, but the structure is compromised; it won't last). But even the simplest assembled experience requires patience and precision. Unfortunately the most profound aesthetic experience is built from an assembly manual that describes the creation of an impossible structure. (In a Charles Ives piano score [for the song "Duty," 1921] there appears a chord made up of 11 notes. Perhaps prayer, or self, is what suggests that this 11th note can be struck as precisely and with as much attention, with as much intention, as the other ten.)

The dramatist's body, my body, is also crucible, as much as performer's, but has the additional burden of requiring the qualities of a spectrometer, which must be as blind, without prejudice or fear, and exactly sensitive to the experience it measures, that sensitivity requiring as precise adjustment to express linguistically, to shape new prayer, as the performer's to express, to audibly articulate and embody new prayer.

13

Desire transformative: Golding's Ovid. Shakespeare was fully aware of the ability of desire to transform not only object but subject: Golding's 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses was his, and a neverending source of inspiration for his work. (And not only Shakespeare; Ezra Pound called Golding's Ovid "the most beautiful book in the language.") This and other Renaissance translations gave birth to the extraordinarily sensuous flowering of the English tongue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the achievement of the Jacobean drama and, in verse, John Donne. In looking back at this poetry we see what we have lost in materialist speculation. Was it, ultimately, Bacon and Newton (and Hobbes and Smith, who sought to put society, economics and politics as the same rationalist footing as Newtonian physics) for whom we have to blame the coarse denial of the senses' possibilities? The limitation to scientific and logical rather than souled and supple instrumentation. (And the difference between Bach's exercises and the music of earlier Renaissance composers such as Machaut and Biber, Bach's passions and masses another story.) The Internet, the cell phone, the iPod only the most recent instances of the replacement of the disintegrating, the tender, the ever-dying human body with the technic of rationalism and wires.

The flesh always prone to transformation, ecstatic decay and metamorphosis. (Yes, even now: improvements in medicine have not changed the integrity of bodily possibility, only its manipulation; Shakespeare's body, Ovid's, Daphne's, Adam and Eve's the same as ours; Shakespeare and Ovid's transformations imaginable in Daphne's, as even Justine's body is self-imagined in, and as, de Sade's own, as Jean Paulhan of the Academie-Francaise helpfully points out in his preface to Justine.) But in this slippery reptilian sensuality the birth of the English language's suggestive possibilities, and the redemption from suffering and stasis that desire offers.

14

The Artist as Advocate: Paradox. How evident, obvious, and self-centered is the public isolate, the artist, in the theatre or any other art. Those who rage against their publics (him, for example, or him; what is it about these Austrians that they turn against their own country so? perhaps a too-close recognition that one of the great human disasters of the century was their own) also rage to their publics. They counsel isolation and silence but enter theatres and concert halls, write and orate. And every art work, every performance, even those that take the form of something other than essay or aphorism, is a work of theory, a theory of perception. (Herbert Blau called a 1982 collection of his essays Blooded Thought, which, it seems to me, is as descriptive of a living philosophy as it is of art.) Each is philosophy, like it or not; and most conform to the philosophy of the day, conformity rewarded with success, one must only turn up the corner of a work of art to see the philosophical and social conventions that lie beneath its surface. The most revolutionary art today, the art that strives for silence and solitude, compassion and love, is worn down and chewed up by the press and the closed-minded audience: rendered ridiculous: the work of art considered as the cheap Molotov cocktail thrown by a wild-haired, black-coated anarchist through the window of a bank. (Though I doubt this happens much any more, not with safety glass, modern science has rendered transparency no longer brittle but as strong as a plate of steel.) And about as effective as that, as a revolutionary gesture.

15

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Art has neither use nor morality. To posit that it is utile is to place the aesthetic experience on the perceptual level of yet another wrench in the toolbox that constitutes the utilitarian approach; to posit that it is moral is to abstract puritanical castles-in-the-air from the contemplation of the individual aesthetic object; worse, that these objects (including the body, or its activities) can be perceptible as good or evil. The moralist (be he Rousseau or John Gardner) who makes these distinctions never fails to place himself on the side of the angels; like God, who could also rationalize his creation of "evil" as a means of recognizing "good," he is sure he knows evil where he sees it.

We may wish to get out our handkerchiefs as we contemplate the damage that the knowledgeless will leaves in its wake, but emotion and self-expression (whatever is expressed, it is not "self") are not elements of the aesthetic event, which is experience and recognition. Emotion arises secondarily from the expression, from our capacity for compassion. The artist who laughs at his own jokes, or weeps at his own elegies, is a panderer, imposing on the audience the proper response to his work. It is the Broadway musical, the Hollywood film. One need only recognize the great performer as one who serves as a vehicle not for the writer's words, or the director's "concept," but as a corporeal expression of the intimations of the will that her body allows her, these intimations provoked by, but not identical to, the expression of the writer, the composer (in the phenomenal world objects and selves, as we commonly understand them, are by definition separate; it is not the composer or the writer who is expressed through the performer's body, but her own recognition of the energy released by their suggestions; in this her integrity and strength and creativity inheres). Selflessness lies, by definition, beyond the reach of emotion. And only selflessness expresses the phenomenal dynamic of the noumenal.

And so far as Rousseau, the concept of the "noble savage" suggests a basic "goodness" in humankind that suffocates all expression of any kind. (One can only think that Rousseau spent far too little time among savages, but in the savage world, the simplest morality inheres: that which is good keeps me alive, that which is bad destroys me. How wonderfully utile, that. And how ignorant of the nature of the "me.") One seeks the amelioration of social ills in institutions; that is what we have governments for, not art. If we turn art into one more ameliorist institution, we have destroyed it, and its possibilities.

Turning the question around: What is society's obligation to the artist (which is as the question should be, for political and cultural power inheres in community, not the individual)? Society's obligation is to provide freedom for these transgressive explorations. Art has no role, or use, or value, to society, for society prefers to destroy the transgressive artist as a means of guaranteeing its safety, conceit, and power. (The individual is another matter; elective affinity operates not between mass and individual, but between individual and individual.) The artist remains separate and alone, to see the world whole, and to offer this world to a society that, as a mob most enamored of its innate "goodness" and self-worth, couldn't care less.

16

Make no mistake. In rejecting dead surfaces and the media, literature, theatre, music that keeps us on artificial life support, numbed by their insistence that in pretending to mean they communicate, and their elicitation of easy laughter that wraps us in the illusion that we have authority over our own lives (how happily we wire ourselves to iPods and cellphones, they feed us fake digital nutrients in sugar-coated form, how long before we screw these earphones into our heads and bolt those virtual reality visors to our skulls and make that our world instead? in the past technocratic authority seemed much more subtle, less explicit), we reach once again for the true power that surges through our bodies, the power to self-define and limn our desires and significance for ourselves. We make no mistake in turning vision and hearing inward. Eros demands that we take The One by the hand with us. Performance a metaphor for it.

Tragedy undermines satire, as the erotic undermines the ironic. In the ecstatic moment the epiphanies of music and language shift the ground beneath our feet. The lyrical insidiously and quietly worms through and weakens tyranny. The work of revolution and freedom is done in small rooms, in whispers, movement approaching stillness, sound approaching silence: the groundwork of freedom must be laid out of the sight and hearing of those of the virtuous tyrant, who arms himself with money and power. And in protecting himself he thinks he is protecting everyone.

17

Neutral. A community which despises the tragic experience, the tragic artist, has a number of means of castration at its disposal. The first (and most recent, and effective) is absorption: an ideological absorption that posits art as ameliorative therapy, the place of art as therapist's couch (once the community has laid the artist down on it, with seeming love and respect, out come the knives). The second is denial of privacy and solitude to the artist (as privacy and solitude are no longer considered as a place of contemplation but of alienation; privacy and solitude now for sale to the highest post-capitalist bidder, marketing and advertising driven by fear), so that the work cannot be done at all; to bury the artist in the same trivia of the day as forms the insulation of the community from an awareness of death. The third is pointless ridicule; faced with tragedy, the community cannot be silent, but is impelled to drown tragic expression in minor sniping, in marginalization, in mischaracterizing tragedy as a pessimism rather than a valid experiential perspective. The fourth is to accuse the artist of isolating himself when, in truth, it is the community which isolates the tragic artist (through attack, or ridicule, or deafening disinterest). As tragedy is an experience of the individual self, the mob despises it. The fifth is to define tragedy as irrelevant to contemporary experience (and in a culture which defines worth as something of practical application, as what can be read from a price tag, as art's digestibility as comfort food, this accusation of irrelevance may be the most damning).

In defense: The artist needs to spit on the hand that holds the knife. In isolation, in the midst of a ridicule which expresses itself in silence, disinterest, and snarky dismissal, the tragic artist recriminalizes herself: the tragic art, transgressive against optimism, progressivism, trivia, and easy amusement, is a crime that saves. She cannot expect company or success, and her rededication, in the midst of loneliness, fear, and intense burning pain of consciousness and frozen social identity, must arise from a belief, a faith, in tragedy's necessity, and the possibility of a healing love, which is mined from its near impossibility and improbability, and is tragedy's message. The pain that sears is a symptom that the spirit and the body have an unmet need, the artist's obligation to find a way of meeting that need. (An entire lifetime can be experienced without meeting this need; the loneliness is real and terrifying; when possibility arises it must be hungrily embraced.) Tragedy is a life, not an art, craft, genre, trope, or career. It requires discipline, daily rededication, concentration, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, in the face of culture's indifference. It is something the artist lives within: her art and life consubstantial. Hence her violent defense. In that profound loneliness, she fights, or dies.

18

19

You must change your life. -- Rilke. Brecht's failure: Revolutions are hatched in small dim rooms, haunted by yellow light and crouched bodies, among the few, in whispers. Not in stadiums, in boxing rings, or on television, or the stage of the Beaumont. The revolution of perspective and consciousness that precedes any social revolution: the world can't be transformed until it is seen anew: recognition of possibilities that emerge from within. Otherwise regurgitation of stupidity and suffering. And even then, there are no guarantees: most revolutions fail, especially those content to repeat the culture's acquired and all too easily replicable tropes of revolution, let alone the rest.

20

The dream of the theatre. After Brecht, I can't talk about the magic of theatre, whether the magician is David Copperfield or Penn and Teller: evocative of empty virtuosity, the empty "Ah!" that turns us into children instead of reawakening what of a child's play and enjoyment in play remains in us as sensuous adults. (So long as all our moments remain within us, we can draw it forth, if we allow it.) And it is that first thoughtless astonishment that most people are talking about when they think of "the magic of theatre" (smoke and mirrors, the latter partner of "bread and circuses"): subsumation of self smothered under spectacle. Empty spectacle robs us of our will to change; we place ourselves in the hands of the magician and become the perfect subjects for the totalitarian, fascistic state, of conservative or radical/liberal persuasion. Magic is a one-way street.

But the dream is two-way, paradoxically it reaches a hand outward to touch the world in its conscious expression. Most theatre is a card trick; theatre minima is a talking in our half-sleep, our unconscious so close to the surface that it emerges from us in a language that bridges sleep and waking, unconscious and conscious, dream/nightmare and the asphalt street, beyond conscious interpretation so that it can only be heard.

Lying on the surface of our unconscious: blood, lighthouses, a reach for the Other. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud writes of our sleeping bodies' physiological reaction to the words and images that we dream. If grasping, we reach; if frightened, our heartbeat quickens and we shiver. Perhaps we try to run, in the fine irony of our condition our body wants to escape what transpires within our skull. If desirous, our body also responds, and warms.

I distrust magic in the theatre. I don't want to be tricked. In being fooled, I am insulted. I want to be invited, not struck over the head by some mallet wielded by an overpaid illusionist with a warehouse of hidden cards and cheap tricks up his sleeve. Theatre allows us to enter the structure of our dreams, points out perspective, what lies behind the word, how it changes. Spectator and artist become one in the recognition and exploration of the unconscious. It is, at its root, aesthetic, a word with its origin in the Greek words aisthetikos (sense perception), aistheta (perceptible things), aisthanesthai (to perceive). Far from abstract, aesthetic feels the world through its flesh. It wakens; leave the anaesthetic for the circus.

21

Let x equal x. In Negative Dialectics Adorno retracted what he'd said earlier about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. "A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream," he wrote. "For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written." ("Poetry" a stand-in for artistic expression generally, Adorno engaging in synecdoche here: plays no longer staged, music no longer composed, dance no longer choreographed, paintings no longer executed.) We might be tempted to excuse Adorno's earlier hyperbolic, mandarin edict from the mountain as a reaction to the circumstances of sudden exile, not only from Europe but also from the Enlightenment that Europe represented.

But he was right in both respects; the poetry and culture that came after the events of the 1940s could not but recognize those events as symptoms of a new, dark culture, the portal into the dark through which the race as a whole had willingly stepped. (And Wagner, and Brecht, and Schönberg, and Webern, and Schiele, and so many others foresaw this step, and we are still unwilling, many of us, to grant them that: the artists of Weimar become urgent messengers of what is being lost.) To say that these events were mere repetition of events of the past is a willing suspension of historical consciousness itself (never mind a suspension of disbelief, this is a suspension of belief): to posit that the cannon, the gallows, the single-shot rifle, the guillotine and the musket were only the death camps, the Ukrainian famine and the atomic bomb writ small is a value- and history-free conclusion that has excused all the continuing suffering that has followed in its wake: the development of napalm, Cambodia, Darfur, and I speak here only of the suffering that humans have visited on other humans, let alone the life of nature generally. That the bureaucratic, post-capitalist corporation, in the form of business and government entities, had taken the place of the church and the feudal system in organizing this suffering along lines laid out in organization charts, rationalized by advances in the social sciences, was a qualitative, not quantitative, change in the culture that the race had built up around it. It seems to be generally recognized that the consciousness that created the suffering of the 1940s must be radically realigned if that suffering is to be prevented once again. But even as we repeat the cliche that it must not happen again, the culture industry burrows the race deeper into darkness. It also makes the division of ideologies, the labelling of ourselves as progressive, or liberal, or conservative, or reactionary within that consciousness, a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Hindenberg, already alight and burning. If it hasn't crashed yet, its destruction is inevitable.

Or we engage in the algebra of suffering and amelioration, looking at science and culture as a continuing quantitative balance: let x equal the suffering that science has brought to the race, y the amelioration of suffering via medicine and agriculture. Is the product of 2x (x representing here the summary execution of a homosexual, or Gypsy, or Shiite Muslim, or an afternoon at Abu Ghraib) equal to that of 1.5y (y representing here a mother's love, or the courage of a man who leaps upon another who has fallen into the path of a subway train, or the boon of digital communication)? This is a Swiftian endeavor straight out of the third book of Gulliver's Travels. It fails in that it ignores historical consciousness entirely, a historical consciousness that is a proper element not only of culture, but most certainly of theatre, music, dance, poetry, and painting.

This isn't to say that all post-Holocaust art must somehow reference the Holocaust. But it must look back to that suffering and our role in it, and not merely in our ancestors' and our roles as victims, but as torturers as well. To paraphrase Adorno: You desire evidence as to the darkness of the world that culture has created; now you have the twentieth century. What more evidence do you need?

"The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless," Adorno continues, "and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to pay a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle." (Emphasis mine -- GH) The poet, composer, performer elicits this unconscious in the service of recognition: the expression of suffering is a form of remembrance of its victims past and acknowledgement of its victims present. Or the poet, composer, performer buries that unconscious more deeply, in trivia and spectacle and the detritus of a culture industry that is peppered through it, the artist excusing its presence as a form of contemporeity or youth, in denying historical consciousness again: not only rewriting history, but erasing it, as Soviet newspaper editors, with their airbrushes, erased inconvenient personages from archival photographs.

A new revived consciousness, an exploration of unconsciousness, may provide hope, even if it's illusory, even if it's impossible. But all conventional morality and ethics and culture, which we have pretended to rebuild since 1945, as if this same morality and ethics and culture didn't lead directly to the events of 1945 themselves, will need to be undermined and overturned, from the most basic unit of human contact and communication (that between two human beings) to the most complex (that between individual and community). Art its expression, irreducable to alegbraic equation. (A corollary: Use of language, sound, body in art must also be ruthlessly re-examined, changed, shorn of ease and convention. A post-Holocaust art will not sound or look the same as pre-Holocaust art, in any case; it can't, if it's to provide that unconscious chronicle of what has changed, is changing: through our bodies, what passes through them, and the sounds we make, the words we use, the images we paint. Intelligibility of artistic expression is the construct of culture as well.)

Those who call themselves artists need to take all this into consideration at every moment of creation. An apology (or apologia), then, for dour seriousness, or for an anti-illusory aesthetic. But I think I was right. The stakes are higher now.

22

Responsibility. Each word I write and gesture I draw in the air is autobiography, and presents one story to the world. Our time is the only time we have to us, the only time knowable, the only time forgettable, the only time that we have to waste. The history that converges upon the point that is my self is something I can't be held responsible for: but I carry it, it is my burden, and I'm obliged to know it. Each of us has only the time that emanates outward from our gestures, words and art (history inheres and informs, but it doesn't end there). And it sears, as no history can. Why we must grasp our time, it is neither inferior nor superior, but it is different, from all others, in that it is ours. The live performance, dying in silence, is its most profound demonstration.

23

You say you want a revolution. A lesson of the 20th century: the revolution is best aestheticized, its origin in the subjective trace of the body, not the body's objectification as a sheerly political or social being. Revolution's failures inhere in their ignorance of this, that politics and society (and their most basic construct, the family, the most intimate communitarian structure of both society and tragedy) are not exclusive but afflict the body with stakes that paralyze. In fact one might say that the urgent need is to embody the revolutionary consciousness in our flesh and individual perspective.

The fear that the culture industry instills in the interest of its own economic well-being, its own hegemony, puritanizes us. One can trace this recognition in the theatre by studying the provenance of dramatic revolution: from Ibsen to Brecht; Brecht demystifies in the interest of political revolution, then is shattered by the events of the Second World War (after which his two major works in the few years remaining to him in his own theatre, in his East Berlin Soviet, are the remarkable Buckow Elegies and his adaptation of Lenz's The Tutor, far more ambivalent about the efficacy of purely political radicalism than the lehrstücke). Beckett completes the demystification of theatre and dramatic practice by dismantling even the Hegelian Absolute in which Brecht found succor, his aesthetic a brushfire that clears the field. Foreman and Barker rebuild on this nothing that Beckett left as a new beginning, a new start. (And this is merely the 20th century, I leave out here the aesthetic revolutions of the Jacobeans prior to the English Civil War, Beaumarchais prior to the French Revolution, Büchner prior to the revolutions of 1848.)

This proves nothing, its validity, as all critical and theoretical constructs, in question as every criticism and theory contains within it the seeds of its own contradiction. Proof is in the bodied performative experience. The spectator takes this example (not a demonstration; this is not an instruction manual) or leaves it be, as he wishes. But the true criminal, the true revolutionary, operates outwards, from the wound, ex-presses it. As revolution is more deeply aestheticized, so is politics. (And this is cyclical. The frightening but liberating loss of security that is demonstrated in Brecht's, Beckett's, Foreman's work suggests that our bodies inhabit a contemporary version of the 1920s and 1950s, that the disasters of 1930s Europe, 1960s Asia are pointing to another perhaps final disaster just around the corner. [If art is the canary in the coalmine, then our effort to demonize the unfamiliar is a form of strangling the bird with our bare hands when the bird would have died soon enough anyway.] We must find a new way of leaping into our pleasure from the expression of our pain, abandoning a desiccated morality, based in post-capitalist possession and the emotional retrogressions and puritanical social structures that provide its support, that which keeps us from an experience and recognition of the noumena, our at-onement with the unconscious as a conscious being.)

24

"Thus, suffering crosses the organs of sense, creates hybrids, produces the labial eye." In Osip Mandelstam's "Conversation about Dante," the structure of the Comedy is compared to the structure and integrity of a body, the human body that produced it, but also a fully integrated object of its own: "I come to the conclusion that the entire poem is one single unified and indivisible stanza," he writes. "Or, to be more exact, not a stanza but a crystallographic shape, that is, a body." Mandelstam also points up the importance of textiles, particularly in the form of carpets and weavings, to Dante's work. It is suggestive of the use of costume in theatre minima; far more important than a pretty set is the effect of textile on the performer's body, the feel and grace of the clothes she wears, which draw from the flesh itself a shape and drapery that magnify and express, the performer master of movement and the arc of the cloth that moves, breathes over the space of the stage. More power to the performer, less to the set designer (though this also gives the light designer something more to do). On the Broadway stage the sets are often applauded when the curtain goes up. Those sets, unlike costumes, are devoid of a human body within, of course: a part of prettiness. Though sets can be beautiful and important, they are, more often than not, in all too many respects in too many shows, irrelevancies, and if irrelevant in a theatre minima they should be dispensed with in a bow to the centrality of the performative body.

Fashion, costume, is a different matter entirely. Language clothes poetic expression, language emerges from sensation in hopes that alchemically this sensation can be demonstrated to the hearer in the form of language (for language is not sensation itself, only expressive and suggestive of it, and language inevitably fails, it can only describe sensation, it must always fail to be identical with sensation, because it is not sensation). But the writer's sensation through language is affected by the language she uses, as the performer's sensation through movement and sound is affected by the feel and touch of the clothes she wears. Le mot juste is as essential to a performative transaction between performer and auditor as the pleat of a skirt or the drape of a shirt is essential to a performative transaction between performer and spectator. It is how the poet moves in language that creates a viable, living text; it is how the performer moves in costume that creates a viable, living gesture.

If the performer expresses beauty, she must feel beautiful; if pain, she must feel pained; if vulnerable, her costume must express and stand in for vulnerability. Part of the theatricalness of theatre, this artful presentation of the body, clothing is body's metaphor as language is the spirit's. We don't wander the streets naked, in terms of public presentation our wardrobes tell us what we are, how we think of ourselves, what we wish to tell each other of ourselves, and because theatre is another form of public presentation costume does the same, our bodies move through and with the textiles with which they're adorned. As a poem moves through and with the words and structures in which it is draped.

25

Tailoring a theatre, or an approach to the theatre, to the young, or to the old, or to any given group of people, is an exclusionary tactic aimed at denying the essential humanity of the individuals who compose that audience: an act of xenophobic hatred that demonises those it excludes, an act of homogenization that tragedy abhors. Tragedy's locus is the individual, alone and in searing pain. Tragedy chastises and liberates the individual, not a demographic group.

Tragedy reaches towards the abstract in the theatrical attempt to use the phenomenal world to limn the outlines of the noumenal. It is more instructive to urge theatre to the condition of music -- not as music's inferior or superior cousin, but as its linguistic performative parallel (as music uses performed sound, dance uses performed movement). The precision and discipline we demand of music and dance, of poetry and painting; this precision and discipline, essential to music and dance's expressiveness, are regarded as hindrances in theatre. This demonstrates theatre's self-loathing: taking pride in its sloppiness, theatre has given up tragedy to music and poetry and lazes about in empty amusement, which doesn't require either precision or discipline. It only requires a decision to be blind to theatre's possibilities. It only requires a mass urge to a dull psychosis with all the appeal of attention deficit disorder writ on the artistic impulse. No wonder people don't want it. They don't need it; it feeds no hunger, no matter how successfully it is marketed.

As sounds are symbols (signifying a network of associations that arise within us as we hear them), so are words (a network of assumptions and associations no less and no more complex as those of sounds); music, a collection of these sounds through time, and theatre, a collection of these words through time. A phrase of music is as evocative of memory and sensibility as a sentence, a group of spoken words; Proust demonstrated this a century ago with Vinteuil's composition and theatre still abhors the demonstration (none of that lovely fun that theatre must have, or be considered dead; never mind that in a dead theatre corpses can be led to dance and laugh, too; in fact, it's expected of them). As recorded music is no substitute for live musical performance, television or film are not adequate substitutes for theatre. There are far more similarities between music and theatre than differences. But if that is denied, so is that need for discipline and precision. We're wrong if we think that Vinteuil's music, performed sloppily or without discipline or virtuosity, has the same effect.

A playwright invents a new structure or subverts a genre, a story, or narrative, or sequence of events through which she presents her words as she hears them in her head; a composer invents a structure, or subverts an existing structure, in which to order as far as she sees fit the sounds she hears. The sonata form, the symphony, the theme and variations; the comedy, the farce, the tragedy, also form existing structures to be twisted, into which the performer is invited to play. The performer invites the spectator, intimately, into that play. Intimacy, a seduction between two people, is a far more dangerous field than a performer bewitching a crowd in the service of her ideology: an ideology of the sclerotic elderly, or aesthetic conservativeness; an ideology of easy progressiveness, of the self-love and self-congratulation of youth. This field is the field of a theatre which can subvert and undermine authority: the authority of the politician, the director, even the author; which can transform consciousness. The other may amuse. But it will never have the ability to change the world, an individual consciousness at a time.

26

Etant Donnes. Duchamp's work is an end for the 20th century, a beginning for the 21st: a means of recapturing the aesthetic experience for the individual, alone; a revolutionary experience in a museum, an experience which returns the recognition of our own consciousness to us. (Like a play, the work can be experienced only in situ; it may be the most profoundly elitist work of art; reproduction of the experience in other media is impossible.) In rendering the spectator a lone voyeur, the installation fractures the conceit of the spectator as an objective, meaning-making consciousness: the work renders the viewer complicit, as complicit in transgression as the exhibitionistic subject. The spread-eagled woman throws us back on ourselves, our eyes travelling also to the light which illuminates her, the landscape behind her, but always drawn back to the naked, perhaps waiting, figure.

Etant Donnes provokes nothing but questions; in its nihilistic refusal to provide closure on the experience, it haunts: we take away from the work our status as voyeurs and must cope with guilt, or shame, or revulsion, or pleasure, or ecstasy on our own. We cannot share the moment with any companion, the construction of the piece does not allow it. The peepholes draw our human curiosity; the image, experienced alone, intensely private, pushes itself into our face, but we have only ourselves to hold responsible for willfully looking, for experiencing the image. Do we welcome it, merge it into our own experience? Do we lose ourselves, and then find new responses in ourselves, in looking? Or do we push it away? As in Cage's music and Barker's and Foreman's theatre, I, the individual spectator, hold power over my own experience. The shock of fracture, the silence which denies final meaning, leaves me to pick up the pieces on my own.

And in a sense it answers an age-old question, and reifies the power of the viewer's imagination, opening freedoms available only to the human being. (The lamp the woman holds is an offer of light, shining upon her, inviting us to gaze on her open body. We decide what we experience in looking: shame, guilt, desire, lust, love. What would two people, lovers, see? That, perhaps, is where the performative arts, music, dance and theatre, can also enter.) For a falling tree in an unpopulated forest does indeed make a sound, if I can imagine it doing so.

27

The artist impoverishes himself to see with just how little he can express, what remains after what is superfluous has been shorn. In this impoverishment is his commonality with his audience: to find the means of exploration with what is left: the least embellished, the most universal. (Any embellishment a necessary embellishment: the grace notes that bring grace.) How close to darkness and silence one can approach, to leave a mark, a "stain upon the silence." Greatest strength in greatest poverty. Nobility not in the poverty itself, but within the aesthetic attempt.

28

Time and history drive their nails, their fangs, deep into the present body: Krapp's vision and his dream of the punt, mother and daughter of Footfalls, inescapable trauma of Not I; the whirlwind of the past that undoes the family of The Homecoming, the old men of No Man's Land, the trio of Old Times. The theatrical past is the personal past for the dramatist, he draws all through his words and unsuccessfully attempts to pin them down, again and again, with the failure of his antecedents in living memory, in some kind of ephemeral present. (All touch and pain memory of touch and pain; receding, left with desire, that same desire for sensation and the feel of the breath on the skin. This is the dynamic of the theatrical moment, the catastrophe of recognition, the knowledge that all falls dark again at the end of the play, a light which does not call attention to itself remains invisible; a light thrown on the stage is that Apollonian consciousness, it pierces, and only pierces when surrounded by the passive dark.) So then theatre takes on a Proustian significance: recapturing in present moment that which is ever disappeared, ever past. Because unrealisable in quotidian life, only realisable between the covers of a book, or between the curtain that rises, then falls.

Light and dark are the simple antitheses of theatre, along with sound and silence, present and past, the end is ever near and scripted, rehearsed over and over for a useless moment of performance. Revolution lies in the deliberate shaft of light and the deliberate word, sculpted by the dark and silence surrounding them. The light falls on a tortuous moment, the word is dragged from the body in its beatific expression of the spirit that lies within the self. The word, like the light, nestles in the dark and silence for only its so brief moment, before it dissipates.

So simple words, for all. So simple light, for all. Bodied speech and presence are impressions on the mute and empty silence. The project and discipline is to suggest these impressions, in some unfinished (because unfinishable) manner, upon the spectator and the auditor. To express a universality, one returns to these basics: instead of inventing new languages (a heinous project, we're all trapped in our languages), one strips one's language and gesture down to the simplest, most elemental traces. Always le mot juste, of course, in its multisyllabic splendor our dictionary is as much a gold mine as our omnidimensional history. But art is a contraction, a laser, not an expansion, a floodlight. The laser cuts in its hot precision. The floodlight cools and comforts, and pretends not to recognize night.

29

Our whole discussion insists that lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not need the image and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness in the music that compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 6

Nietzsche identifies music's "cosmic symbolism" and language's "organ and symbol of phenomena" as ultimately irreconcilable, and he is correct in this: but he still sees tragedy arising out of music's cosmic symbolism.

These are indications of the sign-systems available to the performing arts, those systems that set them apart from the plastic arts: the sign-system of music, the sign-system of language, and the sign-system of gesture are all irreconcilable, but they are joined in an aesthetic palimpsest that leads to the tragic experience. It wasn't so long ago (just over a century) that music, like theatre, was a live performative art and nothing else. The era of sound recording divorced the sign-system of music from the sign-system of physical presence and gesture that accompanied music, in every live performance.

This separation is pained; music without gesture incomplete. In John Cage's work, the invitation to the performer is a primal invitation to re-embody the movement that leads to the formation of sound and to allow sound to inspire and shape a performer's gesture that occurs within that sound's decay. Cage's pacing and movements in Water Walk are an indispensable part of the performance (not to mention the title) of this piece. Its mere aural experience would be lacking. In recent years many composers, such as Drew Baker (who makes frequent reference to his attempts in his music to recapture a "primitive nature" and a "distant past"), have been rediscovering gesture as a primal element in musical performance: the sound a determining and necessary, but not a sufficient, factor in the experience of his work.

The sign-system of language inspires, through the spoken manipulation of that system by the performer, a similar set of movements: therefore, the theatrical moment emerging from the word prior to gesture, but gesture the completion of the tragic word. One might set this as the limit and definition of Nietzsche's differentiation between music and the lyric poet. It may be why tragic drama must fail in recognizing the noumena in a way that remains accessible to tragic music. But only if attempted (and attempted without compromise) in tragic drama does the utmost limit of the theatrical possibility emerge.

Howard Barker: "The actors play the emotions spontaneously, they are not encouraged to think of a motivation, but to keep all possibilities in play, to seize initiatives where the text permits it (or demands it) but above all to listen to the language. It alone can guide them. ... An actor with no sense of musicality can't play me. I am infinitely tuned to the text for obvious reasons, and orchestrate very carefully. I think of myself as the conductor of an orchestra of voices as well as a ballet master."

Billie Whitelaw: "When I work with Sam [Beckett] we don't analyze the plays at all. My first task is to find the music of it."

30

The Class that Possesses. It's an interesting linguistic trope, this: that Shakespeare's work or any expression can be said to properly belong to any group of people (be they theatre practitioners, or academicians, or critics); or that one can lay siege to an expression, grasp it with both hands, and wrest it from the experience of those who also may lay claim to it. Those who utilize the trope may rationalize or excuse this position by explaining that it's merely a rhetorical device, evidence of stridency, but the choice of rhetorical device reveals the unconscious, unexamined ideology of those who opt to utilize that device in defense of that possession: they are making a property claim: they are capitalists, through and through, who own, and use the property they own as they see fit, belittling the claims of others who would like to examine that possession. In possession there is moral right and authority.

The ideology underlying this vocabulary is that of a possessory class, a class that can say an expression is "mine" or "ours": experience as property. It delineates the worldview of those who use such words. And within that trope of possession lies moral, ethical, and value judgements. A Beckett text belongs not properly to the page but to the stage, the argument may run, and stage practitioners should be allowed to utilize or contextualize this text in some romantic notion that in restaging Beckett's words through our own "talent" (if that's what we choose to call it) we are serving the play much more than Beckett himself, or his estate, would have us do. We, as theatre practitioners, are right. Beckett and his estate are wrong. We seize the text and Beckett himself be damned. No longer "his," we call it "ours." We impose that interpretation of Beckett on our audiences: the class that rules over interpretation; the audience our peons, who consume what we tell them is true.

Beckett was as much of a man of the theatre as was Shakespeare; he knew what he was doing, and he knew what he was doing when he included his sparse stage directions as part of the dramatic text: the reader of a play directs this play himself, hears it, sees it, in his own imagination. Dramatists allow their plays to be published so that each individual reader can be his own interpretive artist. Read as literature or staged as literature, the play belongs to no one but the individual who experiences it: not to directors or actors, nor to playwrights alone. But the playwright, as he who arranges the words, is first. Not I is not possible as a play until Beckett writes it; King Lear not possible as theatre until Shakespeare offers the expression built in words. As the aesthetic experience inheres in the individual auditor or reader, that is where meaning eventually lies, to whom the experience properly "belongs": not the professors, nor the denizens of the rehearsal room, but the individual alone in the study or alone, even when sitting with others, in the dark of a theatre.

31

Blood relations; "We're just a bit of pollution." Family is the locus of the first tragedy; it shall be the locus of the last: the dynamics of the nuclear family, the events and personalities that spin around it, conceal the cancer at its heart. Ultimately family is a blindfold for the original sin, as Sophocles, Shakespeare and Beckett had it, of having been born; in bearing children we step into the role of gods, the unconscious destructive will. (If the original sin is having been born, what does that mean for us, how does that define us, the beings who continue to make and bear children?) The audience and performer in the theatre form a forced family, for the duration of a play: an extended family, we would have it; we prefer to think of each of us as a character in a George S. Kaufman family farce, reconciled at the end. But reconciliation is impossible. Solitude, destruction and loneliness are inescapable. Laughter and ameliorist conceptions of community are fictions in tragedy.

Whether it is blood, or genetics, or sentiment, or health insurance coverage, or common cause that holds a family together, neither the performer nor the audience can know it truly, except that it is beyond our senses and belongs to the realm of the noumenal. We can guess at the traits of the noumenal, but no more than that. The physical universe itself is beginning to provide evidence of this; science may be reaching its end. In an article about recent discoveries about "dark energy" facing cosmologists, this unknowability even begins to reach the public press:

The difference with ["dark energy"] is that it lies not only outside the visible but also beyond the entire electromagnetic spectrum. By all indications, it consists of data that our five senses can't detect other than indirectly. The motions of galaxies don't make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. The brightness of supernovae doesn't make sense unless we infer the existence of dark energy. It's not that inference can't be a powerful tool: an apple falls to the ground, and we infer gravity. But it can also be an incomplete tool: gravity is ... ? [Ellipsis in original.]

... now has come the metaphorical morning after, and with it a sobering realization: Maybe the universe isn't simple enough for dummies like us humans. Maybe it's not just our powers of perception that aren't up to the task but also our powers of conception. Extraordinary claims like the dawn of a new universe might require extraordinary evidence, but what if that evidence has to be literally beyond the ordinary? Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it's not "normal," either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know.

Perhaps science is finally catching up to tragedy. Perhaps our rationalistic stages can be prepared for tragedy again. (If it's possible for a dead delusional theatre which prefers to remain blind to be prepared for tragedy again.) Perhaps, in recognising our delusional condition, we rediscover and begin to recognise the microcosm in the macrocosm again and are freed, no longer prisoners of our self-satisfaction and metaphysical arrogance (embodied performance, because most vital and direct, the most effective avenue of this recognition): our own unfathomable dark energies that hold ourselves and the tragic family together, the dark matter which is our own blood and flesh.

32

Terror of the everyday and the necessity of glamour. The embrace and worship of the everyday tedious and repetitive gesture suggest a hatred, even abhorrence of extremity, of transgression, this hatred and abhorrence born (as most hatreds and abhorrences) of fear: A well-founded fear that these will undermine the security and assurances of the everyday. (Tragedy doesn't provide health insurance.) Never mind that this love of the quotidian is composed of a thin veneer of self-importance and an unwarranted expectation of permanence. The possibilities of experience that extremity and transgression invite are drowned in tedium: the tedium of meaningless repetitive work to no end except that of money and security (there is repetitive work in art, in practice, essential to art's necessary precision, but its end neither fiscal nor safe). The tedium of possession, again born of fear: new cars and condominiums, things to anchor us more deeply into the phenomenal, the dull but insatiable throb of its everyday desires. In their tedium is our security. For some it is air and water, this security. For some it is a drowning death-in-minimal-life.

Small pleasures, greater pains: nothing like the body in the throes of death and decay: fluids ooze, heads pop from bodies dropped through the gallows' trap door. How self-absorbed, without explanation, the living bodies surrounding those of the dead and dying. Clothed in bluejeans and sneakers. These living bodies adorn their self-hatred with the democratic casual.

Erotic tragedy is a glamorous art. It holds comfort and ease as abominations. It's no wonder that it's so informed by luxurious clothing, robes and well-wrought nets. Clothing fetishizes the body as the body fetishizes the spirit, but the fetish provides access to the signified, which stands beyond the object itself. (Costume has always been more signifying than scenery. The eros of the mask, mask of the face as costumes mask the body: tragedy is a clothed art.) Lush, beautiful costumes, a couture by definition tailored to the individual body of the performer who wears it. Hence the costume's individual expressivity, hence it contains the self's loneliness and desire for union, its vulnerability reaches for the Other. As far from tedium and the quotidian as can be achieved.

Tragedy is not about sensible shoes, as Howard Barker suggests when he discusses the meaning of costume in Gertrude:

[Gertrude's shoes have] heels of such extravagant dimensions how can you move except by dislocating your entire anatomy [...] should shoes not enhance the action of our limbs should they not encourage us to act in sympathy with the body's functioning not trick us into grotesque parody ... [the intention of] all nakedness in my own work where the gesture of revelation is endowed with performance, above all, challenge to transgress the social/political routine, to subvert the situation and thereby disorientate, to force a collapse on the spectator (by spectator I mean the opposite character in the play ...)

Couture, elegance, glamour are by definition theatrical and presentational of the human body. (No nakedness in my plays, leaving them incomplete, something for the audience to imagine, that's their work.) Rediscovery of the expression of erotic tragedy. The clothed onstage body to encourage in the spectator (by spectator I mean the individual sitting in the audience) an unclothed exploration offstage, in secret, conspiratorial and intimate; a new self-awareness too in the public world: to render that world too a place of beauty and elegance emerging from the phenomenal self. Instead of, by encouraging that democratic casualness and comfort, murdering the spirit through tedium and trivia that mask only boredom and despair.

33

"The Death of Tragedy." As if to say, at the beginning of 2007, that tragedy is no longer necessary? Relevant? Accessible? Possible? As with most "death of ..." tropes, it represents wishful thinking more than anything else. Such phrases make good book or essay titles. The attempt to reinvent the old forms in the guise of the ancients or the Elizabethans falls short (mere archaeology, slapping bright paint on the pain of the ancients and wrapping it in Christmas lights, bringing joy to the childish). Contemporary Americans, it appears, have neither the history nor the vocabulary for it (ideologies of left and right, in seeking the ameliorist heaven on earth, a heaven politicians and ideologues think can be found at the center of hell, can't contain the tragic consciousness), and therefore not the interest. But this is merely appearance. The human craves a recognition of the tragic, the American as human as anyone else. If the theatre does not give it to her, she goes elsewhere. No wonder the stage so desiccated and sick. It isn't that the tragic is irrelevant; our theatre is irrelevant. The young and shallow wish for their fun, and they shovel it onto the center of the stage. It reeks of waste.

The place for childlike play in tragedy, to find pleasure in the transgression of cultural and social bonds, to laugh, to have one's breath caught short in pleasure. But this is not the same thing as fun. Fun amuses, is safe, consumerist society and culture keep fun penned in the barricades of its puritan limits. Play, on the other hand, is dangerous: it leaps over the barricades of the allowable. And therefore liberating. Play is joy, irrational wonder, the laugh that shatters community. Fun finds ironic giggles, trivialization, nothing of the self or identity risked. Fun can be incorporated in the Las Vegas spectacle; it constitutes no threat. The ecstatic cry of play, on the other hand, denies the validity of the mob's wishes. It is purely bodied pleasure, to which tickets can't be sold. Fun is amusement for the Costco shopper. Play places assumptions, conformity of any ideology, at risk.

Of course tragedy is alive. It is alive in the work of Barker, Kane, and Crimp. It is alive in the late work of Beckett, in the sexual tragedies of Harold Pinter. In music: in Feldman, Barraqu??, Murail. In painting and photography. But not in the Microsoft Word documents of American playwrights in the early 21st century, or the stages to which MFA and play development programs grant them entry. The maudlin tragedy of Arthur Miller is not tragedy at all, but melodrama (and certainly no play in it). Tragedy in America has yet to be invented. (Our poets have made a start, but their work remains pagebound.) Its place is the theatre. Rather, its place was the theatre. (Perhaps those who would like to integrate television and film into the theatrical experience should admit their professional ambitions and go and work in television and film.) Greece had existed for hundreds of years before it staged its first tragedies; England for 500 years before the birth of Shakespeare. Perhaps one day on these shores. Unless we trivialize ourselves out of existence and bastardize all human possibility into a series of YouTube videos long before then.

34

The wound is real, felt, and deep: it is personal and searing, not merely a rhetorical trope. Amusement and diversion are its killing denials. Tragedy is its acceptance, play its redemptive possibility.

35

Criminal intent. The tragic and the erotic intertwine in the recognition, experience and memory of the sublime that contains and sensually validates death as individual, ecstasy as fusion of individuals, experientially in orgasm and materially in reproduction, fully and entirely aware and deliberate (not to deny the mystery that a single experience contains both). As these are recognitions and not ameliorative, they refuse to serve society, in particular the society's culture industry, which sickens, kills and blackens what it touches. In fact, quite the opposite: the highest tragic and erotic experience in theatre is contained in the expression of its elegant fetishistic criminality, a love in which the audience, as individuals, is invited to conspire.

36

Ways of knowing/seeing/hearing. In exploring the beginnings of perception and of art we also explore its outermost limits. Schopenhauer's elucidation and extension of Kant's delineation of the limits of the phenomenal world reach back to First Perceptions, First Questions: what we experience through the sensory apparatus which is our body, how we experience it. To the corrected Kant, experience of the phenomenon is constrained by the a priori precepts of time, space, and causality: succession, position, and what might be called motivity, B's reactions to A's own existence in this given framework of perception, back beyond which and towards its furthest extent one touches on the noumenal, on the thing-in-itself (the will, in Schopenhauer's construct), or what lies beyond the Hindu maya. An empiricism that denies this noumenal (as so much empiricism does; it was the frightening implications of the continuing philosophical probing beyond these seeming phenomenal limits that gave rise to the foolishness of utilitarianism) abandons the philosophical obligation to continue asking "Why?", to abandon the wonder that any existence at all is possible, this wonder the first principle of philosophy itself.

These first precepts are, as well, the basis of all that is known and knowable, and not merely the preconditions of art but certainly the preconditions of an empirical science of consciousness. It has become clear over the last century that the Hegelian project has failed in the effort to restore science and art to the unity which it found in the early pre-Socratic philosophers, and which gave rise to the notion of tragedy itself. Note: the emergence of Cartesian dualism in the first half of the seventeenth century dealt a death blow to Western tragedy, which found its wildest and most extreme expression in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans. (Shakespeare dies in 1616; Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is published in 1641; the English theatre closes under Puritan rule in 1642. Causal? Probably not. But a notable coincidence, if not. There is a sense in which Cartesian empiricism would make it utterly impossible for the ruined, weak, hungry, shattered, dying Lear to have the strength, at the end of act five, to "reenter ... with Cordelia dead in his arms"; phenomenally impossible, but noumenally necessary. Beckett considered King Lear utterly unstagable, and it could be that in a world before Descartes this wasn't the case; in a world after Descartes and empiricism, this is the case.)

Kant and Schopenhauer revolutionized perception, a revolution with has yet to have its full effect. But even the empirical sciences in recent years have begun to correct their original dismissal of transcendental idealism, the original dismissal based in misunderstanding and ridicule; Hegel and Marx were found much more useful to power and authority, and much more prone to easy absorption into academic philosophy; of Kant and Schopenhauer there is too much of the artist. In the July 2002 issue of Physics Today, a journal published by the American Institute of Physics, Neil Ribe and Friedrich Steinle cite chaos theorist Mitchell Feigenbaum's conclusion that, after two centuries of dismissal Goethe in his Theory of Colors may have been right all along (Ribe and Steinle also discuss the use of "exploratory experimentation" in contrast to Newtonian investigation, in so doing suggesting avenues for art as well as science). And in his study of Schopenhauer's work, Bryan Magee observes that quantum physics has been finding in Schopenhauer's concept of matter-in-itself as an indescribable nexus of energy a concept that predates contemporary scientific observation by two hundred years. He also notes that, "Ever since the publication in 1941 of Konrad Lorenz's paper 'Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology' more and more biologists of reputation have stressed the Kantian nature of the view of perception towards which modern science is leading us. This is corroborated also by the work of some of the most distinguished of modern psychologists of perception, such as Richard Gregory and Stuart Sutherland. Through the work of such figures as Noam Chomsky it is even finding its way back into philosophy."

The body as what we can call the Prime Object -- though as much object as an apple in front of me, nonetheless the only object through which I might intuit that energy known as noumenon -- is the basis of first principle in art, and in the work of theatre artists like Richard Foreman and composers like Tristan Murail (currently the Francis Goelet Professor of Music at Columbia University), we have this rediscovery; their repeated attempts at limning the principles of expression and perception have their roots in this transcendental epistemology and begin to reap the aesthetic benefits of the Schopenhauerian ontology. And this is all based not in some Cloud-cuckoo-land of abstraction, but in the very essence of bodied experience itself. Foreman notes in a 1990 interview with Ken Jacobs the very real basis of this ontology: "I saw a particular static moment from my seat in the Circle in the Square where I watched a rather dreadful production of The Balcony. And I remember seeing Shelly Winters, on one side of the stage, and Lee Grant on the other, and it was just a moment of stasis, and a moment of a kind of tension between them, and I just wanted to make a whole play that had nothing except that unresolved tension between them. And I wrote out of that. I said that's what I want in the theater, just that moment, and it doesn't develop into any of the other awful stuff, the psychological stuff, the narrative stuff, the adventure stuff that it always develops into." The "unresolved tension" that Foreman investigated has its roots in the time, space, and causality of the Kantian world, and since 1968 he has been exploring its origin, over and over again, not unlike Goethe's method of "exploratory experimentation."

In returning to what he called his project "to return to the true essence of the piano, to its acoustic realities, and to ignore the trivialities of fashion as well as the weight of history," Tristan Murail is engaging in the same kinds of exploratory experimentation. Murail uniquely perceives the avant-garde as both a historical and an an-historical locus of investigation. In his essay from 2000, "After-thoughts," in the Contemporary Music Review, Murail identifies one of his principal aims as "research," in the nature of this Goethean project. Sounding not a little like Schopenhauer in his distrust of academicism, Murail writes, "Composers should not be satisfied with music that is simply there to please. They should not allow the style of their music to be dictated by fashions, the easy acceptance of institutions, of orchestras, or of the regular concert going audience. These are not sufficient reasons for writing music, for stealing from the life of another. Unfortunately a number of trends are more and more prevalent in composition today which either ignore the problem of communication, or which -- resting on the ambiguous notion of postmodernism and on pseudo-musicologic or pseudo-philosophic discourses -- are in fact not much more than disguised academicism." He goes on:

We are often told that the avant-garde is behind us, that we have achieved so much distance and perspective that only a "post-modern" attitude remains possible. However, in my daily work as a composer this idea is disproved. I continue to search for new ideas and materials. Some of this research is on a technical level -- clearly the case when speaking of developing new computer programs or new ways to facilitate the comprehension of sonic analyses -- but another type of research that I perform daily is purely musical and aesthetic, looking for ways of effectively using the material which I discover to create new sonic/musical objects. By "new," I mean something that I want to say but have not already said, and which no one else has said either. You cannot express original ideas by recycling old material: new thoughts need to be formulated with new material. Our vision of the world has become so historical now that when we speak of the avant-garde, we automatically think of the avant-garde of the nineteen fifties. But if we stick to the etymology of the word, by definition there always will be an "avant-garde" or our civilization is dead. Let's stop being ashamed of this notion!

This position may seem ironic, since at a certain point the "spectral movement" was seen as a reaction against the "avant-garde." And clearly it was a reaction against certain composers who believed that they were the avant-garde. But, in reality, it was a reaction against their refusal to make even the slightest concessions to the phenomena of auditory perception. Abstract combinations on paper are not musical research. As a result, we fought against this type of musical behavior. However, we were not the only ones to criticize that music which was so prevalent during the late-sixties and early seventies. Advocates of the music I referred to above as disguised academicism accused the so-called "avant-garde" of emptying the concert halls and alienating the listeners through their decadence and excesses and, in a certain manner, their criticism was justified. However, one need not respond to these criticisms as they have.

Murail, in noting that he explores "the phenomena of auditory perception," is as much a transcendental epistemologist (so far as this is relevant or valid) as Foreman is when he sees bodies reacting to each other, as they contact via sense. But these explorations find limits, always; and both Murail and Foreman press against these limits as they, unlike the empiricists, keep asking the questions required of philosophy and art: the eternal "Why?"

Theatre can next explore the terror and tragedy of and beyond the phenomenal, and what possibility of bodied renunciation and ecstasy in art and theatre (and lessons for us: in our own bodied experience, to reach and touch the ecstatic sublime). To return, as Foreman and Murail, to first causes, to posit responses to the intuitions of the body in this instrumental condition of tragic perception. Inhering entirely in the instrumental, performative body.

37

No escape. Even in our greatest pleasures we find the greatest pains, opening our flesh to its fullest sensibility renders us that much more profoundly sensible to the wound that doesn't heal, the heights of our pleasure equal the depths of our suffering. There are those who consider, rightfully, causality as a dull prison rather than as a calculus of practical, pragmatic achievement: an equation without irrational numbers. Prisons are all predictability, dullness, greatest fear in the least uncertainty. Pragmatism seeps into the heart of theatre and gains purchase on its organs of expression, growing like a cancer, spreading from one element to another. But this is a dishonest, unhealthy wound. It is a wound which finds its motivation in its dull nature, instead of a wound self-inflicted, motivated by the necessity to discover. Alternatively: in that deep pain the greatest, most rewarding pleasure, until the two commingle and it's hard to say which is which. American pragmatism, as it inflicts its own wounds, approaches all wounds as of the same nature (and believes that an antibacterial salve and a band-aid will suffice to heal), pessimism perceived as a disease of the mind and spirit, whereas it is recognition, which lacks cure. What is seen cannot be unseen. Suffering and pleasure of which we are capable remain with us as ghosts and ambitions of the psyche. In art, we reach.

38

On Reading Howard Barker's "Gertrude": Statements of Intent. There are practical outcomes and effects in approaching theatre as sensual lyricism, one such effect a growing realization of contemporary theatre's death (and not a tragic death that contemplates the ends of ecstasy and the decay of the body, but a psychic death of numbed, anaesthetized nerve endings and cold shallow eyes of glass). Death inhering in unquestioning acceptance of the falsehoods of meaning-bearing mainstream narrative (instead of the discrete event or the event of language itself), meaning-bearing mainstream character (what a lie, this superficially-possessed idea of integrated character; our lives don't have character arcs over time, the pretense that they do another nail in the coffin of our ability to exist; we constantly change, "growth" is a value judgment that dismisses the elemental; how can we have a significant theatre that lies to us like this? We so intently kill the possibilities of experience with interpretation). Some plays, the few plays that can possibly reify the theatre as a life-giving force, are unapproachable except as music, performers and composers without self to filter language, sensibility, sensuality.

I no longer ever ask questions about meaning aloud, questions about meaning invite that hideously vapid death. René Char: "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions." Especially the question, "What does it mean?" Which is attempted homicide and should be prosecuted and punished as such.

I would prefer (playwright as composer) not untrained performers but performers trained as musicians (actress and actor as joined with instrument, that instrument the body, speaking, as musical instruments are beautiful and profoundly integral and sovereign in their histories and construction when silent but most beautiful when sounded); as with soloists or chamber ensembles, the director or conductor utterly unnecessary; the text itself director enough, the score itself conductor enough. (Directors are meaning-makers, conductors perhaps not so much because their music more physiologically supple.) This lays a heavier burden on us all. But unless we burden ourselves with these imperatives our worlds remain unshattered. Effect lies in study and discipline; is there life otherwise?

Another practical effect: compulsion to study the piano again. And continual, renewed recognition of the need for secret conspiracies, among spiritual co-conspirators, in darkened rooms. This is also as political as it sounds.

38

"The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction." Beckett's "principle of parsimony" restricts expression to the smallest gestures in the most confined spaces, for all the broad expanses of the landscape it is still the interior of a skull. The artist chooses between the encyclopedic Finnegans Wake and the muck-under-the-microscope of How It Is.

It seems clear that Joyce's early imprecation to the artist -- that she must choose "silence, exile and cunning" in Stephen Dedalus' classic formulation -- is a failure. (In all fairness to Joyce, it must be said that he too, in maturity, recognized it as a failure.) All movement is within, through the veins and arteries, very real flesh and blood, of the self. No exile provides comfort, no cunning enough to trick the Will. She swallows, she absorbs the world, lest she be swallowed and absorbed by it. In the erasure of the line between subject and object, she can't objectify through escape from the shores, but maps inwardly, to find affinities and affordances, other selves and objects and events with which she can join and thereby produce and express, to become fertilized by them, to give birth. "Silence, exile and cunning" still accepts the dichotomy, defines one by violent opposition to the landscape, rejection of it. Better to offer, and disappear into, silence, time and solitude (these perhaps the only principles worth fighting and dying for), violence not in opposition and separation but in union and integration.

NOTE: Above is Part I of the Organum; Part II continues here.

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